Alasdair Allan (author)

Alasdair Allan speaking at the Thingmonk conference held in Shoreditch, London, in September 2016.

Dr Alasdair Allan (born 1973) is a British scientist, technologist, and author, known for his work around emerging technologies. He has written and experimented extensively in mobile computing..[1] and distributed sensor networks[2].

He has spoken extensively[20] on the topics such as big data, mobile technology, and the internet of things. He advocates for data privacy, and spoke[21][22] at the TEDx Exeter Salon in October 2017 about how the Internet of Things has changed the concept of ownership, exploring issues around privacy and security.

Allan was named a "Top 50 Influencer in the Internet of Things" by Oanalytica in 2014[27] and 2015[28], one of the "top journalists to follow on the Internet of Things" by the Huffington Post in 2016[29], and one of the "Top 30 Internet of Things Influencers" by relayr in 2017[30]

The Data Sensing Lab[31] was an idea that came from a conversation between Allan, Tim O'Reilly, and Edd Dumbill (now Edd Wilder-James) at OSCON in 2011. The stated aim was to bring experience of 'messy' data to data scientists more used to working with cleaned, and processed, data. Along with collaborators[32] Allan deployed small scale sensor networks throughout O'Reilly's Strata conferences in 2012 and 2013. The mesh networked sensor platforms provided real time data[33] on the venue.

In 2013 the Data Sensing Lab team, then consisting of Allan, Julie Steele, Kipp Bradford, and Rob Faludi, along with some members of the Google Cloud Platform team deployed[32] a large sensor network throughout Moscone West during Google I/O[34]. The network consisted of 500 individual nodes mesh networked in a Zigbee mesh, they continuously measured temperature, pressure, humidity, light, audio and RF noise, motion, and air quality all through the venue and over the entire event.

In 2011, in collaboration with Pete Warden, Allan uncovered[35][36] one of the first major mobile privacy scandals, which was later dubbed "locationgate"[37] by the media. The discovery lead Senator Al Franken to write a letter[38] to Steve Jobs, and subsequent class action law suits[39] and the US Senate hearings[40] around location privacy that pulled in both Apple and Google. The event was notable enough at the time that it was mentioned as a meme on South Park[41]

Along with Marshall Rose, Allan was one of the founders of The Thing System[42]. This startup was one of the early experiments around collaboration between theoretically incompatible Internet of Things smart devices in the home. All the software from the company was open source[43] and mostly written in Node.js. The startup was ultimately unsuccessful in raising enough funding, and folded in 2014.